Of course there is nothing wrong in having non-official, or
let's call them "fan" pages, about Debian on Facebook. As a matter
of fact we already have one, as you point out. And I also agree
that it would be better to know who is behind that page.
Individuals, including Debian Developers, are obviously free to use
whatever media they please to spread the cause of Debian. After
all, as individuals, each of us decide upon her own
personal trade-offs (for instance, a trade-off of
mine is to have both identi.ca
and twitter accounts and
to post only to the former with forwarding to the latter).

There is no way to have an official Debian Facebook page and
pretend that we are not, de facto, endorsing Facebook. That's why I
believe having official Debian presence on
Facebook, or on any other non Free Software platform,
will just weaken our cause. It will send out the
message that Free Software it's something which is good for others
to use, but not necessarily for Debian as a project.

That does not mean that we live under a rock and that we
consider social networks useless to promote the
Debian cause. It just mean that we should be picky in choosing
social networks that respect our Free Software principles, as we
are picky in choosing licenses that are DSFG-free.
For instance, I'm glad to mention here that the Debian publicity team
has recently obtained access to http://identi.ca/debian and
will start using it soon. Subscribe!

PS This post also gives me a chance to comment
on a so called "community
page" of mine on Facebook. As I've briefly commented a few days
ago I've nothing to do with that page. TTBOMK its content is
just automatically injected from
Wikipedia. The "Stefano Zacchiroli is on Facebook" claim on the
upper left is true only in the sense that there are other
people with my name on Facebook. IANAL, but such a claim (not
the page in itself) will probably be considered an abusive
advertisement in many countries around the world.

But so, following your reasons, shouldn't we consider the debian
repository non-free section an endorsement of propieatry sotware
too? I understand your reasons, but, for the actual situation, I
don't think that an extremistic-like way of action would provide
some results... At least, not now...

I completely share what Mako said but when I work as a
debian-publicity team member, my goal is to spread the world to as
many people as possible without annoying them (i.e. no spam).
That's not time that I want to spend on working on a free
alternative to Facebook and I'm glad that some people are already
doing it (Joindiaspora that I mentioned, GNU social maybe too).

I'm not suggesting to promote Facebook on www.debian.org or
whatever, I just want that Facebook users who are looking up Debian
in Facebook find something more useful to them than an empty wall.
It doesn't require to use the service on a regular basis, but just
to setup the proper "RSS to Facebook" gateway.

But to get control of that Facebook page, the person who is
going to contact Facebook needs to claim that he is more legitimate
in representing the Debian project than the current person who owns
it (to the best of our knowledge).

The only possible way to use Facebook for Debian would be a page
that clearly describes why Debian does not plan to use it (proper
reasoning in the media itself), absolute limited to that, potential
suggesting alternatives. Setting up rss feed for it though is
already using it and would be sending the wrong message,
redirecting people to the already existing steams of information
flow might be an acceptable compromise.

With all the people leaving Facebook again it would be a very
strange move to join now and claim that we don't endorse it with
actually using it.

But so, following your reasons, shouldn't we consider the debian
repository non-free section an endorsement of propieatry sotware
too?

In a sense, you're saying that we should "discriminate" the
non-free section. Yes, we should, and as a matter of fact we do
already. non-free is not part of the Debian distribution and is
already "discriminated" in several ways.

I'm not suggesting to promote Facebook on www.debian.org or
whatever, I just want that Facebook users who are looking up Debian
in Facebook find something more useful to them than an empty wall.
It doesn't require to use the service on a regular basis, but just
to setup the proper "RSS to Facebook" gateway.

But to get control of that Facebook page, the person who is
going to contact Facebook needs to claim that he is more legitimate
in representing the Debian project than the current person who owns
it (to the best of our knowledge).

My reading of your blog post (still) gives me the impression of
a more ambitious goal than that and in particular of a goal where
the subject of the action is "Debian".

You pointed out that a "Debian" Facebook page already exists. I
fail to understand what stops you, or any other individual
which both cares for Debian and is on Facebook, to improve that
page. I for sure won't stop you, nor I would have any specific
moral judgement to hold against you. You might raise the point that
you're currently not in control of that page (AFAICT), but if the
person who is cares about Debian, for sure he will welcome your
help.

If the person is not willing to cooperate, too bad. That's a
battle that can be fought by people that care about Debian on
Facebook, but that cannot be fought by Debian as a project.